I like to play games.
And to no one’s surprise, I guess I’m really into escape rooms.
What are escape rooms, you ask?
Borrowing elements from point-and-click adventure games, live-action role-playing, interactive theatre, treasure hunts, movies, and TV shows, an escape room is “a live-action team-based game where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time”.1
Escape rooms are a relatively new concept, and they’ve become quite popular in recent years. The first escape rooms were created in Japan in 2007 and have been growing rapidly in the last few years, exploding from 2,800 rooms throughout the world in 2015 to over 7,200 in 2018.2
I expect to see the number of escape rooms around the world to continue skyrocketting because escape rooms are great for breaking you out of your comfort zone and injecting some much needed excitement into your mostly boring and sheltered modern life (sorry but it’s probably true).
Escape rooms are the ultimate form of healthy bite-sized escapism. For a brief period of time (usually about an hour or so), you and your friends are physically transported into another world and you’re tasked with, well, escaping.
You and your friends might be handcuffed and placed in two adjacent prison cells, tasked with freeing yourselves and solving a murder.
You and your friends might be arriving late to a party at a chalet and have to solve a series of Saw-esque puzzles to escape with your life.
You and your friends might be test subjects trying to survive through a time travel experiment gone wrong.
Doesn’t that sound exciting to you?
What’s genius about escape rooms is that they’re grounded in the physical space we live in and in the existing relationships you have with the group of friends you go into the room with.
Everything else in an escape room is designed to provide you with an interesting shared experience unlike anything you’ve experienced in the past.
Are there bad escape rooms out there? I’m sure although I haven’t been in one myself.
Escape rooms aren’t all perfect, you might run into a moon logic puzzle or two. Your gamemaster (the person who’s watching your progress and making the experience go smoothly) might not be the best at their job. Any actors involved might not be selling it super well.
BUT
A great escape room is going to completely blow you away and give you an experience you’ll never forget.
Next time you want to go out with your friends (or a special someone), instead of going to the movie theater to watch some trash, how about you go to an escape room?
It might be a little more expensive but trust me it’ll be worth it.
Soon enough, there’s going to be an escape room on every street corner and it’ll become harder and harder for you to keep avoiding it.
If you have tried an escape room before and you didn’t like it, well…
Who hurt you and how can I help?
Nicholson, S. (2015) “Peeking behind the locked door: A survey of escape room facilities”, White Paper, pp. 1- 35, [online], http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/erfacwhite.pdf ↩︎
Kroski, E. (2019) Escape Rooms and other immersive experiences in the library, Chicago: ALA Editions. ↩︎
Follow me with fraidycat, or an RSS reader, to be notified whenever I write something.